Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

352. “Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

353. “Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

354. “The wise needn’t ask, the fool asks in vain.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

355. “Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation – overcrowding – reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you’re not, what does that mean? Maybe that you’re afraid of human contact – of being close to people, of being touched.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

356. “I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

357. “Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice – the power of change, the essential function of life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

358. “To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

359. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

360. “Old Age Is Not for the Young.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

361. “The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

362. “She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

363. “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

364. “The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

365. “In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful – another piston in the great machine?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

366. “I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

367. “Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

368. “Progress means nothing to presence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

369. “What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day – from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

370. “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

371. “Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

372. “We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

373. “Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number – Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

374. “In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves; it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

375. “If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

376. “If your voice is heard by more people because you’ve earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

377. “Art is not a horse race. Literature is not the Olympics. The hell with The Great American Novel. We have all the great novels we need right now – and right now some man or woman is writing a new one we won’t know we needed till we read it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

378. “Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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379. “The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man. That wasn’t original, he’d read it in some old books; but it was true. That was why he liked to imagine scenes like that. Even if the creechies weren’t actually men.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

380. “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

381. “He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

382. “Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row. We will laugh together, Together we will cry. If he lives I will live, If he dies I die. Where my love is going There will I go. Where his boat is rowing I will row.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

383. “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

384. “Almost anything carried to a logical extreme becomes depressing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

385. “Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

386. “Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

387. “Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

388. “Despair speaks evenly, in a quiet voice.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

389. “Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

390. “The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

391. “There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

392. “But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

393. “And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

394. “Morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

395. “If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin – the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

396. “But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death’s kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

397. “It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

398. “Very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

399. “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

400. “All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin